Arts news

• Police Recover ‘James Bond’ Diamond-Encrusted Fabergé Egg Swallowed by Thief

  05-12-2025 21:04 via artnews.com
  After six days of dedicated surveillance, New Zealand authorities have recovered a diamond-encrusted Fabergé egg from a thief accused of swallowing it. The 32-year-old man allegedly picked up the egg at Auckland’s Partridge Jewellers and ingested it late last week. The heist was swiftly foiled, as police arrived within minutes of the staff’s report and detained the suspect. “Police can confirm the pendant was recovered,” a police statement said Friday. “
  
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• Newly Established UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art Names Kathryn Kanjo as First Director

  09-12-2025 21:16 via artnews.com
  This fall, the University of California, Irvine, and Orange County Museum of Art completed their amicable merger, creating a new entity: the UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art. Today, the new institution named its first director, Kathryn Kanjo, who currently leads the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD). She will assume her new role in February 2026, and will also oversee the UC Irvine Jack & Shanaz Langson Institute of California Art.Kanjo ascended from MCASD’s chi
  
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• Nnena Kalu Wins Turner Prize, Becoming First Learning-Disabled Artist to Take UK’s Top Art Award

  09-12-2025 21:06 via artnews.com
  The Turner Prize, England’s most high-profile art award, has named Nnena Kalu as its 2025 winner. She will take home £25,000 (about $33,300), while the three other shortlisted artists will receive £10,000 ($13,000).Kalu is officially the first-ever learning-disabled artist to win the award, which has in past years gone to artists such as Anish Kapoor, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Lubaina Himid. She is also one of the few Black artists ever to have received the prize.Born in Glasgow i
  
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• Looted ‘Nude Emperor’ Statue, Marble Head Returned to Turkey

  09-12-2025 20:25 via artnews.com
  A California antiquities dealer has surrendered to New York prosecutors a 2,000-year-old bronze statue of a Roman emperor believed to have been looted from an archaeological site in Turkey, as first reported in the New York Times.Aaron Mendelsohn, 74, a Santa Monica philanthropist and former medical technology venture capitalist, purchased the headless bronze torso, known as Nude Emperor, from a now-defunct New York gallery in 2007. However, the Manhattan district attorney’s offi
  
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• Christina Vassallo Departs Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati for Pew Center

  09-12-2025 19:55 via artnews.com
  The Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, announced that its director, Christina Vassallo, will leave the museum, effective January 2, 2026. She will join the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, a grant-making organization in Philadelphia, on January 5.“It has been an honor to shepherd CAC and be part of Cincinnati’s vibrant artistic legacy,” Vassallo, the museum’s director since 2023, said in a statement. “I’m so proud of the exhibitions we’ve b
  
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• Claire Tabouret’s Designs for Notre-Dame’s New Stained Glass Windows to Go on View in Paris

  09-12-2025 19:50 via artnews.com
  A show of French painter Claire Tabouret’s designs for six new stained-glass windows for the Notre-Dame cathedral will open to the public tomorrow, reports the Art Newspaper. The Los Angeles–based artist’s full-scale, ink-on-paper maquettes for the windows will be displayed at Paris’s Grand Palais museum through March 15.The new windows will replace 19th-century lights installed by architects Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and Jean-Baptiste Lassus, who won a commission to r
  
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• Swedish Court Acquits Climate Activists Who Smeared Paint on Monet Painting

  09-12-2025 19:26 via artnews.com
  A Stockholm court on Monday acquitted six activists who smeared red paint on the display cade protecting a Claude Monet painting, ruling that they had not intended to damage the work.The painting, The Artist’s Garden at Giverny (1900), was on loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris to the National Museum of Sweden as part of an exhibition on Impressionists and gardens when, in June 2023, two young women spread paint onto the glass covering the vibrant depiction of pink and p
  
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• Napoleon Jones-Henderson, AfriCOBRA Artist Who Wove Images of Black Power, Dies at 82

  09-12-2025 18:28 via artnews.com
  Napoleon Jones-Henderson, a member of the AfriCOBRA collective who made art for the age of Black Power, died in Boston on December 6 at 82. Wonderland, a Boston-based art publication, reported that Jones-Henderson had been battling cancer.Jones-Henderson was one of the key artists associated with AfriCOBRA, a Chicago-based group whose members synthesized African styles with emergent Black forms of expression in the US. Founded by Jeff Donaldson, Wadsworth Jarrell, Jae Jarrell, Barbara Jones-Hogu
  
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• Pantone Color Institute Executive Addresses ‘Cloud Dancer’ Controversy

  09-12-2025 17:44 via artnews.com
  Pantone has been taken to task by some media outlets, and more critics on social media, for choosing “Cloud Dancer” — a version of white — for the 2026 Color of the Year.Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, was unavailable for an interview Monday about the pushback, nor were other executives at the company, according to a spokeswoman.In a lengthy statement that was issued by the spokeswoman, Eiseman said, “The
  
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• Brazilian Police Arrest Suspect in Theft of Matisse Prints from São Paulo Library

  09-12-2025 17:04 via artnews.com
  Updated December 9, 2025In a daylight robbery on December 7, two armed thieves stole eight prints by Henri Matisse and at least five engravings by Brazilian modernist painter Cândido Portinari from the Mário de Andrade Library in São Paulo. The works were part of “From Book to Museum,” an exhibition that was presented in collaboration with the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art. The show, which focused on art linked to books and included examples of artworks an
  
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• New Designs for Notre-Dame Windows Displayed, Swedish Climate Activists Acquitted for Smearing Paint on Monet Artwork, and More: Morning Links for December 9, 2025

  09-12-2025 16:28 via artnews.com
  To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.Good morning!
  Claire Tabouret’s designs for the Notre-Dame de Paris stained-glass windows goes on public display tomorrow.A Swedish court said climate activists never intended to damage a Monet painting they covered in red paint, and has acquitted all six defendants.Pantone has issued a statement in response to controversy over its selection of a shade
  
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• Brooklyn Museum Reveals 2025 Acquisitions, Including Poignant Calligraphy and Christian Marclay’s ‘Doors’

  09-12-2025 16:00 via artnews.com
  The Brooklyn Museum has revealed the more than 600 works that it acquired in roughly the past year, providing a view into the institution’s collecting priorities as it marks its 200th anniversary.Contemporary art continued to be a core focus, with works by Tony Bechara, Nicole Eisenman, Jack Pierson, Enrique Chagoya, Bisa Butler, and others of note joining the museum’s holdings in 2025. Also among the newly acquired works is Christian Marclay’s 2022 video Doors, which is curren
  
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• As Museums Raise Ticketing Prices, MoMA PS1 Will Offer Free Admission for All

  09-12-2025 15:11 via artnews.com
  While other institutions across the United States raise their ticketing prices to $30—and, in a few cases, even higher—New York’s MoMA PS1 will stop charging admission fees altogether for the next three years.Supported by a gift from Sonya Yu, a creative strategist who appears on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list, the plan will go into effect at the start of 2026 on the occasion of the museum’s 50th anniversary year. While MoMA PS1 had already offered free admission to
  
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• The Year in Black Art: Six Group Exhibitions

  09-12-2025 15:00 via artnews.com
  The year 2025 saw several solo exhibitions by well-known Black artists, including Kerry James Marshall, Amy Sherald, Rashid Johnson, Jack Whitten, Lorna Simpson, and Elizabeth Catlett. Following his exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, Marshall is now lauded as one of America’s most important artists. Sherald resisted “a culture of censorship” at Washington, D.C.’s National Portrait Gallery and moved her show to the Baltimore Museum of Art. Johnson made the entire r
  
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• The Philadelphia Art Museum Takes a Close Look at its (Kind of) Biggest Attraction: The Rocky Statue at its Front Door

  09-12-2025 14:16 via artnews.com
  The Philadelphia Art Museum is organizing a 2026 exhibition centered on a famous artwork that is closely associated with it but is actually not part of its collection: the statue to Rocky Balboa, the fictional boxer created by Sylvester Stallone, that stands at the top of the imposing stone steps (now often called the Rocky Steps) leading to the institution. “Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments” will open in April.The show is curated by a man who lives and breathes public mo
  
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• The Best New York Art Exhibitions of 2025

  09-12-2025 11:00 via artnews.com
  The winds of change blasted through New York in 2025. Dealers fretted about the state of the market as galleries closed. Curators privately worried about what could and could not be shown as an oppressive President returned to power in Washington, D.C. Deep-pocketed collectors died, raising questions who would take up their mantle, and longtime institutional directors vacated their posts. Everyone in the art world kept talking about uncertainty.  
   
  There were many reasons to feel
  
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• Remembering Robert Grosvenor, Quietly Elegant Sculptor of the Ordinary and Peripheral

  09-12-2025 11:00 via artnews.com
  It was 1978, and I was sitting in the first row of a medium-size classroom at the Rhode Island School of Design. RISD was a good school. We had a robust lineup of speakers. Mostly they were painters, sometimes there was a sculptor, always they were men listing their shows and presenting their artworks in precious detail. I was open to believing in their importance. Enter Bob Grosvenor, showing some images but saying almost nothing by way of description, though he politely answered a few how
  
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• Anatomical exhibition includes rare Victorian-era drawing of a black body

  09-12-2025 06:00
  The work of surgeon and artist Joseph Maclise is the focus of a show at the Thackray Museum of Medicine in Leeds It is an image of an unnamed black man with his eyes closed and his innards exposed. Drawn with care and precision, the image may be the only anatomical drawing of a black body made during the Victorian age.Now it is part of a new exhibition that focuses on the work of Joseph Maclise, a surgeon and artist whose work – including his 1851 atlas Surgical Anatomy – made the hu
  
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• A Guerrilla Artist’s Latest Project? Game the Billboard Charts With an Album Made by 100,000 People

  08-12-2025 21:42 via artnews.com
  Editor’s note: This story is an edition of Link Rot, a bi-weekly column by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei that explores the intersections of art, technology, and the internet.The plan? To steal the number one spot on the Billboard music charts using the power of the internet. All it would take was convincing 100,000 people to be in a band together. Dubbed Everybody’s Album, the work is the brainchild of Danny Cole. A painter, designer,and performance artist, Cole has gaine
  
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• Brazilian Police Identify Suspect in Theft of Matisse Prints from São Paulo Library

  08-12-2025 19:57 via artnews.com
  In a daylight robbery on Sunday, two armed thieves stole eight prints by Henri Matisse and at least five engravings by Brazilian modernist painter Cândido Portinari from the Mário de Andrade Library in São Paulo. The works were part of “From Book to Museum,” an exhibition that closed on Sunday and that was presented in collaboration with the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition, which focused on art linked to books, included examples of artworks a
  
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• Louvre Staff Vote ‘With Unanimity’ to Strike, in Latest Blow to French Museum

  08-12-2025 19:35 via artnews.com
  At a meeting of 200 Louvre staffers from three unions, employees voted “with unanimity” in favor of a strike set to start on December 15, the Agence France-Presse reported Monday.A strike notice was filed by the CGT, CFDT, and Sud unions to France’s Ministry of Culture and shared with the press. In it, the unions said “visiting the Louvre has become a real obstacle course” for visitors, describing the museum as being in “crisis” with “increasingly
  
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• Art World Figures Remember the Late Frank Gehry, Internationally Renowned Museum Starchitect

  08-12-2025 18:49 via artnews.com
  Frank Gehry designed some of the world’s most recognizable cultural landmarks, from museums like the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris and the Guggenheim in Bilbao to Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago. Gehry died on December 5 at age 96. Over the weekend, many figures in the worlds of art and architecture remembered Gehry for his groundbreaking designs and outsize personality. On Instagram, artist Rob Pruitt posted a photo of his living room wi
  
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• Nashville Museum Seeks Help Restoring Red Grooms’s Tennessee Foxtrot Carousel

  08-12-2025 18:45 via artnews.com
  In 1995, armed with a grant from a Nashville nonprofit, New York–based artist Red Grooms set out to create a working carousel for the city of his birth. Three years later, the Tennessee Foxtrot Carousel opened to the public on city land at the base of Nashville’s Broadway.Instead of the usual horses, the ride featured mounts modeled after figures from Tennessee’s history, all rendered in the Pop artist’s cartoonish style. The 36 characters included both the famous and the
  
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• UBS Report Provides a Sliver of Hope for Dealers: Many Billionaires Aim To Spend More on Art and Antiques

  08-12-2025 18:37 via artnews.com
  The eleventh Billionaire Ambitions Report from Swiss bank UBS provides a sliver of hope in a shaky moment for dealers of art and antiques—if they manage to get access to that coveted demographic.Global billionaire wealth reached an all-time high in 2025, says the report, published last week, noting that 196 self-made billionaires added $386.5 billion to their combined wealth, pushing that figure to a record $15.8 trillion—the second-highest annual increase recorded in the history of
  
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• Artist Zineb Sedira Picked for Next Tate Britain Commission

  08-12-2025 18:19 via artnews.com
  Tate, the UK museum network, announced Monday that Zineb Sedira will take on the next Tate Britain Commission, which is staged in that institution’s neoclassical Duveen Galleries. The commission, the artist’s largest to date, will run May 2026 to January 2027, and it will be curated by Jessica Vaughan, Tate Britain’s curator of contemporary British art.Sedira is known for an expansive practice that encompasses photography, performance, video, and installation. Her works typical
  
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• ARTnews 2025 Awards Announced, Trump Kennedy Center Seizure Capped by Honors Event, and More: Morning Links for December 8, 2025

  08-12-2025 16:55 via artnews.com
  To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.Good Morning!ARTnews has revealed the winners of its annual awards in six categories.President Trump hosts the Kennedy Center Honors after a year of seizing control of the arts institution.Celebrated photographer Martin Parr has died at age 73.The Headlines ARTNEWS AWARDS 2025. It’s that time of year. The second annual ARTnews Awards winners w
  
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• ‘It’s been called the greatest hip-hop film ever’: how we made cult graffiti classic Wild Style

  08-12-2025 16:02
  ‘I handed a guy a starting pistol for a stick-up scene. But instead he reached into his car and took out the sawn-off shotgun you see in the movie’I was part of the New York graffiti artists the Fabulous 5, who were primarily known for painting whole subway cars on the Lexington Avenue line. Lee Quiñones was the group’s Michelangelo. I’d been running with Jean-Michel Basquiat and wanted to take graffiti art into art spaces. I thought that an underground independent
  
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• ‘I’m a prisoner of hope’: Olafur Eliasson on using art to bring us together to save the world

  08-12-2025 15:00
  Inside Presence, the Icelandic-Danish artist’s epic new show in Brisbane, what you see changes based on where you stand or how you look – crucial when it comes to tackling the climate crisisI gasp as it comes into view: an enormous sun looming above, its surface roiling with what looks like thousands of tiny atomic explosions. It seems to notice me as well: when I stop, it stops too. It’s both awe-inspiring and unnerving.In the mirrors around the glowing orb, I spot Icelandic-D
  
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• ARTnews Awards 2025 Lifetime Achievement: Ralph Lemon

  08-12-2025 12:00 via artnews.com
  Ralph Lemon for “Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon” at MoMA PS1, New York
  November 14, 2024–March 24, 2025Never content to work in just one medium, Ralph Lemon spent the past three decades creating works that blur the divisions between dance, drawing, painting, installation, sculpture, and writing. He started out as a dancer and choreographer, operating the Ralph Lemon Dance Company for a decade before disbanding it in 1995 to focus on other artistic endeavors. Lemon sees
  
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• ARTnews Awards 2025 Historical Artist of the Year: Jack Whitten

  08-12-2025 12:00 via artnews.com
  Jack Whitten for “Jack Whitten: The Messenger” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York
  March 23–August 2, 2025
  Curators: Michelle Kuo, with Helena Klevorn, Dana Liljegren, and David Sledge Across his six-decade career, Jack Whitten repeatedly found daring, innovative, and new ways of wielding paint, only rarely using the traditional oil-on-canvas method that has long dominated his chosen medium. During the late 1960s, he began using acrylic, a type of paint that dries faster
  
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